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In August last year I set up a few Twitter archives using the Twapperkeeper service. The archives were based around the theme of ‘Love libraries’ , ‘Save Libraries’ and stored any tweets that used combinations of these words in them. At the time I was getting disheartened about all the flack public libraries were getting and I was just looking for something positive.

I had great intentions to do some kind of creative mashup with all these tweets, but never got around to it. Since starting these archives I got heavily involved in the ‘Voices For The Library’ campaign, which is a national campaign defending the value of public libraries in the UK, and that has been my focus. The reason I set up the tweet archives was the same reason I got involved in VFTL.

Yesterday (16/01/2011) something fantastic happened – Twitter user @MarDixon started the ball rolling to get #savelibraries trending. Up until yesterday the #savelibraries archive contained just under 500 tweets and today it contains 4890. When I set up the archives I was hoping something like this would happen, but didn’t know if it would. Yesterday showed the clear support for public libraries, during a time when UK councils want to needlessly close so many of them – over 370 at the last count!

So, thanks to @MarDixon we now have an archive of ‘Save Libraries’ & ‘Love Libraries’ tweets overflowing with library positivity waiting to be used creatively in a data mashup and…

I want to issue this challenge to the data mashup community.

Come up with a creative data mashup that makes use of these tweet archives for the ‘MarDixon Voices For The Library Data Mashup Challenge’.

The end result can be anything you like, as long as you use any combination of the following archives.
“Love The Library”
ilovelibraries
lovelibraries
#savelibraries
#saveourlibraries
Love public library

All of these archives are available as RSS feeds, HTML pages, or Excel files.

So, are you up for spreading the word about library goodness into the big wide world in the form of a data mashup? Come on, I know there are people out there up for the challenge. Use your mashup talents to create something around a cause that is so high profile right now.